Dawn of the Dumb (15 page)

And just as you’ve come to terms with that, the show goes into freefall: Annalise screens her film, and the entire episode turns into a bizarre clipshow in which former cast members reprise their old roles for a few seconds apiece. And again, they all look a bit old and puffy—even Holly Vallance, who only left about five minutes ago.

Scott and Charlene are notable by their absence—although Annalise has thoughtfully included footage of their Ramsay Street wedding, apparently by going back in time and hiring a four-man camera crew. Having tested our suspension of disbelief with that, it’s a shame they didn’t go the whole hog and include updates from those characters who left Erinsborough in a coffin. I’d have loved to see, say, Jim Robinson bellowing a few lines from heaven (never spoke without shouting, that man).

Anyway, by the end you’re left feeling monumentally blank: a bit like someone who’s just had 20 minutes of their life stolen by an idiot. In other words, it’s classic
Neighbours
. Here’s to another two decades of televised Valium.

The Jeremy Kyle Show

[22 October 2005]

B
reaking a leg. Watching a burglar shoot your cat. Eating a punnet of vomit and faeces. Unpleasant experiences all—but none, surely, is quite as unpleasant as grimly chewing your way through an entire edition of
The Jeremy Kyle Show
(ITV1).

Officially, it’s described as a ‘confrontational talkshow in which guests thrash out their conflicts, dilemmas and relationship issues in front of a studio audience’, although that doesn’t come close to capturing the flavour of it. That just makes it sound like Trisha, the show it’s replaced. It isn’t like Trisha. It’s worse. It makes Trisha look like a dainty philanthropists’ tea dance.

The key word in that official description is ‘confrontational’, because Jeremy’s USP, you see, is that he’s unafraid to hurl abuse at his hapless idiot guests. So when some greasy bi-toothed, boss-eyed scumball is guffawing about how many times he shoved it up his girlfriend’s mother, Kyle shouts something like ‘You amoeba of a man!’ The audience applaud, the chav is humbled, and Jeremy seems secretly pleased.

In other words, everything about
Thejeremy Kyle Show
is completely and utterly horrid, starting with Jeremy Kyle himself. At first glance, he looks like a cross between Matthew Wright and a bored carpet salesman. Harmless, you think. But then something draws you back for a second look, and this time—ugh!

I mean, look at his eyes. There’s a spine-chilling glint to them—it reminds me of the ‘shimmering pupils’ effect used in Russell T. Davies’s
The Second Coming to
denote which characters were agents of Satan. Not that I’m saying Kyle himself is an agent of Satan, you understand. I’m just saying you could easily cast him as one. Especially if you wanted to save money on special effects.

You know that weird ‘thing’ about Nicky Campbell? That indefinable ‘thing’ that makes him ever so slightly creepy, like you wouldn’t want to get stuck in a lift with him, because you half suspect he might suddenly pull a Stanley knife from his sleeve and start wildly slashing at you with a terrifyingly blank expression on his face? Well Jeremy Kyle’s got that same ‘thing’ about him, but amplified by a factor of twelve.

Every time I see him, it’s like someone’s just walked over my grave. I’m starting to think it’s some kind of premonition. The spirit world is reaching out, trying to warn me that Jeremy Kyle is somehow destined to kill me. I’m not sensing the word ‘murder’—chances are it’ll be an accident. Yeah. That’s it: next week I’m crossing the road and bang—Kyle’s vehicle inadvertently mows me down as it carries him en route to his shit and awful show.

Brrr. Just typing this makes me shudder. Look, if I’m found dead in the next few weeks, can someone tear this out and hand it to the police?

I’m veering off-topic. Back to the programme itself, which is infected by a curious linguistic virus: everyone in the studio uses the phrase ‘on national television’ at least five times per minute, meaning the show consists entirely of exchanges like this:

Seacow: ‘Oh, so you’re admitting, on national television, that you cheated?’

Baboon: ‘Ha! I can’t believe you can sit there on national television, and accuse me of that- on national television!’

Satan: ‘Woah, you two—is this any way to behave on national television?’

Do they always talk like this? If an argument breaks out in their kitchen, do they say things like, ‘I can’t believe you’re telling me this now—in the kitchen.’Well?

Actually, perhaps they’re just trying to remind themselves where they are. After all, sitting there with Jeremy and his iridescent pupils glistening before them, confronted by a studio audience so ugly they’d make John Merrick spew down the inside of his face-bag, the poor sods could be forgiven for forgetting they were on national television and starting to believe they were somewhere in the bowels of hell instead.

As could the viewers at home.

Mariah Carey bullshit

[29 October 2005]

S
o winter’s virtually upon us. The nights are cold and dark. The skies are bruised and drippy. Bird-flu victims litter the pavements. It’s depressing. No wonder all you want to do is stay indoors swaddled in your duvet, drinking tea and watching
The X Factor
(ITV1). Who can blame you?

After all, some of this year’s contestants can genuinely sing—by which I mean they invest their performances with genuine passion and soul, instead of just doling out the usual technical wibbly-wobbly note-bending you see in contests like this (you know—the sort of hark-at-me Mariah Carey bullshit that only the very thickest breed of moron could possibly enjoy).

Yes, some of this year’s contestants are the best yet. And some very very much aren’t.

Take Chico—or to give him his full name, Chico Time. Chico can’t really sing at all—not even the wibbly-wobbly way. All he can do is yelp like a dog getting its prostate examined by a vet with sandpaper hands. That’s a drawback in a competition like this, and Chico knows it. Fortunately, he’s hit on a way to compensate for his lack of vocal expertise: leaping about like a ninny. He also grins, flashes his pecs and shrieks ‘It’s Chico time!’ quite a lot.

Chico’s performances are so rubbish, they quickly plunge beyond ‘crap’, ‘rotten’ or ‘abysmal’, drop off the bottom of the chart, and reappear at the top, next to ‘brilliant’, ‘visionary’ and ‘epoch-making’. He inadvertently borders on greatness. As such, he thoroughly deserves his place in the contest.

Unlike Journey South, a pair of excruciatingly earnest male Gillette models who specialise in shouting and looking slightly pained. I say ‘slightly’ pained—1 mean ‘extremely’. Each time they hit a particularly sincere section of the lyric, they go all red-faced and funny-looking, like they’ve been stuck in a lift for three hours and need to go to the toilet, but can’t because there are ladies present. They creep me out.

And as for their name—they’re not fooling anyone with this ‘we’re two northern lads who got in a caravan and headed down to London to seek our fortune, hence Journey South’ bullshit. It’s a euphemism for cunnilingus. I know it, you know it…hell, even Kate Thornton knows it, and she probably doesn’t even have a vagina-just a smooth Barbie-style bump. Journey South. For God’s sake. I mean, come
on
.

Who else is in it? Well, there’s Shayne (good voice, pleading eyes, looks like every male
Hollyoaks
cast member ever rolled into one), Phillip (so off-key last week he seemed to be showcasing a new avant-garde vocal style which takes utter disregard for melody as its starting point), Maria (top-heavy Mariah Carey type), the Con-way Sisters (a Poundstretcher version of the Corrs), and Chenai (so blub-prone she’s in danger of crying all the fluid out of her body).

Which leaves us with three genuinely excellent performers. There’s Nicholas (who last week managed to cover Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ without desecrating it in the slightest), Brenda (sassy Aretha Franklin type with a voice the size of Jupiter) and finally, forty-one-year-old Andy, who according to the official
X Factor
website ‘works as a Dustbin Man’—not a ‘binman’, you’ll note, but a ‘Dustbin Man’—which makes him sound like some kind of waste-disposing superhero. They keep banging on about him being a binman as though it makes him part of a different species, which is a touch patronising, and probably a little depressing for any binmen watching at home, hunched before the screen in their Dickensian hovel. Anyway, whatever he is, he can certainly bloody sing.

In my book, those final three make equally deserving winners. Simon, Louis and Sharon might as well call the contest off now and manage one each. But sod it, like I said, it’s almost winter, and bird flu’s on the way. They should stay on air. Cooped in our hatches, we’re going to need all the telly we can get.

…And it Smells good too

[5 November 2005]

S
o we return, initially, to
The X-Factor
(ITV1), since last week’s edition can’t pass without comment. Not because arse-voiced skittering marionette Chico Time’s still in the running, although that’s incredible in itself. No. What we’re interested in here is Sharon Osbourne, and her ever more disturbing preoccupation with contestant Shayne Ward.

A fortnight ago she yelped that she wanted to grab hold of his ‘private parts’ while he sang a high note. Last Saturday she outdid even that. The twenty-one-year-old Justin Timber-like had just performed a yawnsome trudge through Bryan Adams’s ‘Summer Of ‘69’ when he found himself impaled on an outrageously flirtatious spike in chatter, courtesy of La Osbourne. ‘I’ve got something to give you/ she cooed, batting her eyelashes. ‘It’s warm and it feels good—and it smells good too.’

It sounded like the set-up for a
Carry On gag
—ah, I get it, it’s a mug of cocoa!—but as it turned out, there wasn’t a punchline. She really was talking about her Jemima Puddleduck, and didn’t care who knew it. What’s she going to do for an encore this week? Draw him a picture? Vault the desk and wipe it down his leg?

For all their faults, it’s hard to imagine Simon Cowell—and impossible to imagine Louis Walsh—spouting similar stuff at the female contestants. ‘Oh, Chenai! Chenai, Chenai, Chenai! I’ve got something to give you Chenai. It’s long and it’s straight and it’s twitching with joy. And what’s more—it stinks.’

It’s all the more curious since the great British public recently decreed Sharon their ‘Most Popular TV Expert’ at the National Television Awards. An expert in what exactly? Behaving like a mad aunt at a wedding? Going into sexual meltdown? Gordon Ramsay was a runner-up—perhaps if he’d livened up
Kitchen Nightmares
by threatening to bugger the chefs, he’d have won (although he’d also have had to hand back all those hygiene awards).

Currently, all Sharon does is ooh and ahh over the contestants as though they’re made of freshly-baked gingerbread. Still, perhaps it’s part of die build-up to the moment in die final few weeks when she finally snaps—just like last year when she launched into a bizarre personal attack on luckless Steve Brookstein. Here’s hoping.

Anyway, on to
Bleak House
(BBC1), whose place in the weekday schedules is enough to make you take leave of your senses and get all dewy-eyed about the BBC’s contribution to our collective spiritual well-being. It’s the primetime soap equivalent
of Deadwood
, and I don’t mean that disparagingly.

Unlike every other TV previewer on Earth, I’m a scarcely educated ignoramus who’s never read
Bleak House
, nor had it read aloud to me in sonorous tones by a mortar-boarded master. So I can’t tell you how faithful Andrew Davies’s adaptation is, or whether Johnny Vegas’s repellent, slobbering Krook is so stunningly accurate it’s like he’s stepped off the page and blown off in your living room. I can’t even tell you precisely what’s going on, because just like
Deadwood
, my brain seems to be several steps behind the actual storyline at any given moment—but in an enjoyable, wallowing sort of a way.

In other words, I like it a lot. The one criticism I can muster is that it suffers slightly from cameo-overload syndrome. Occasionally the absurd number of well-known faces involved makes the process of watching it feel like lolling on a sofa, drunk, at Christmas, while a relative systematically fast-forwards their way through a comprehensive DVD box set containing every television drama serial ever made.

Come to think of it, just about the only famous person who hasn’t shown up is Sharon Osbourne. Well, not yet. Perhaps the final episode revolves around a mad gothic aunt at a wedding, coming on to the best man, berating the groom and biting the head off a bat. Who knows? I haven’t read it. And don’t lie: neither have you.

Slough of despond

[12 November 2005]

E
verybody hurts. Everybody bonks their head against the hull of despair now and then. Everybody finds themselves drifting along the pavement, fuelled only by the gentle throb of sadness—their eyes fixed on a distant thundering nowhere, while the rest of the world babbles idiotically in the background. Everybody’s turned their smile upside down and felt it drip off their face. Yes, everybody hurts. Everybody’s got a headful of boo-hoo.

Well, OK—not everybody. Just people who live in Slough. And can you blame them? It’s a concrete-and-brickwork heckhole; a broken diagram of a town, famous solely for being (a) the setting for
The Office
, and (b) the subject of a Betjeman poem that wished a blitz upon it. Slough looks like it was never actually built, merely crapped into position by a misanthropic, mediocre God. It’s not a town—it’s a misery engine.

And that’s why the positive-thinking gurus faced with
Making Slough Happy
(BBC2) have their work cut out for them. Yes, it’s ‘social experiment’ time, folks—a new series in which a team of ‘happiness experts’ descend on Slough in a bid to stop the populace sobbing openly in the streets. Heading up the project is former journalist Richard Reeves, author of a book on happiness in the workplace and a man so eerily, robotically pleasant, you wouldn’t be surprised if his face suddenly fell off, revealing a set of circuit boards and flashing LEDs.